Science – Ars Technicahttps://arstechnica.com
Serving the Technologist for more than a decade. IT news, reviews, and analysis.Tue, 20 Mar 2018 01:34:20 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.3https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-ars-logo-512_480-32x32.pngScience – Ars Technicahttps://arstechnica.com
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Mon, 19 Mar 2018 20:45:00 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=1278335

Studies of the bones of dogs, large cats, turkeys, and other animals found in the Maya city of Ceibal show that, as early as 400 BCE, the Mayan elite were importing dogs from distant corners of Guatemala and raising large cats like jaguars in captivity, probably all for use in elaborate rituals at the pyramids in the center of the city.

“Animal trade helped sustain many large civilizations, such as the Romans in Europe, the Inca Empire in South America, the Mesopotamians in the Middle East, and the ancient Chinese dynasties,” said archaeologist Ashley Sharpe of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the study. But at Ceibal, the imported animals seem to have served purely ceremonial or political purposes, which may have played an important role in the growth of the powerful Maya state.

Captive jaguar

The work is based on discoveries at a pyramid near the ceremonial center of Ceibal, an important Maya city in what is now Guatemala (the city is also known as Seibal and El Ceibal). Archaeologists found the jawbone of a large cat—probably a jaguar—mixed in with ancient construction fill. A jawbone doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to let archaeologists reconstruct what the animal ate and where it came from. The ratio of stable carbon isotopes stored in the bone, for example, can tell researchers whether the animal or its prey ate a lot of grain or foraged on more woody plants in the forests around Ceibal, while nitrogen isotope ratios reveal the amount of protein in the animal’s diet.

By providing a way to symbolize and communicate our thoughts, does language enable us to reason? Or are inference, deduction, and other forms of logical reasoning independent of our ability to put words to them? It’s hard to figure out whether babies can think, given that they can’t tell us, which makes separating language from reasoning even harder.

Ernő Téglás, at the Babylab in Budapest, researches “how infants acquire the conceptual sophistication necessary for abstract combinatorial thought involved in everyday reasoning.” His team has just published a paper describing the precursors of logical reasoning in pre-verbal infants. One group of infants was aged 12 months and the other was 19 months old; babies at these ages are just at the cusp of language learning and speech development, but they definitely precede the development of extensive language.

Wrong expectations

Like 20-something adults given the same tests, these babies expressed distress when their deductions did not hold true. Distress came in the form of staring at the inconsistent outcomes, which is how baby cognition is often measured.

Climate science has kind of had its day in court before. In 2007, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 fits the definition of a pollutant under the Clean Air Act—a decision that forces the US EPA to draw up regulations to tackle climate change, regardless of political winds. But on Tuesday, climate science will literally have its day in court, as a federal judge receives a five-hour tutorial he requested on the subject.

The case pits San Francisco and Oakland against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell. The cities are alleging that major oil companies sold fossil fuels while knowing their use would change the climate—and, critically, publicly campaigning to convince the public they would not change the climate. As San Francisco and Oakland incur significant costs building infrastructure to protect their cities from sea-level rise, they want oil companies to chip in for the bill.

The case, which would obviously set a huge precedent if the cities won, already seems to have gone further than past attempts. Other judges have booted suits on the grounds that emissions should be regulated by the EPA and therefore the issue can’t be decided in a courtroom. But the specifics of the California case—going after sellers of fossil fuels rather than local users of fossil fuels—convinced Judge William Alsup that it can go forward.

Enlarge/ SpaceX is likely to build the BFR rocket, and the BFS spaceship shown here on the Moon, near its California headquarters. (credit: SpaceX)

Anyone who has visited SpaceX's rocket factory in Hawthorne, California, knows that the company has filled up its facilities with Falcon 9 first stages, payload fairings, and Dragon capsules. In the coming years, as the company transitions into manufacturing the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR vehicle, it will need a lot more capacity.

The company has not explicitly stated where it will build the BFR, expected to measure 106 meters tall and nine meters wide. However, it needs to do so near water, because such a large vehicle cannot be transported to the launch pad or test sites via a highway, the means currently used to move the Falcon 9 rocket.

A new document from the Port of Los Angeles indicates that the company is moving ahead with plans to build a "state-of-the-art" industrial manufacturing facility near Long Beach, about 20 miles south of its headquarters. The document summarizes an environmental study of the site for the port, on behalf of a proposed tenant—WW Marine Composites, LLC. This appears to be a subsidiary company of SpaceX.

I first met Stephen Hawking in March 2003, when the most famous scientist in the world visited Texas. For a young science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, an invitation to interview Hawking during a stop in College Station rated as a real coup.

Reporters never like to submit their questions to a subject in advance; indeed it is something I often refuse to do. However, with Hawking and his limited ability to communicate, this was a prerequisite. As almost all of his motor skills had atrophied, Hawking used a custom-made computer to form words, which were then spoken through a voice synthesizer. Typically, he could form a short sentence in about five to 10 minutes.

Prior to meeting with him, I asked a number of scientific questions of Hawking. But, after all of these years, the one query, and answer, that sticks with me concerned the hottest issue of the day, the impending Iraq conflict. What did he think about the likelihood of the United States going to war against Iraq?

Enlarge/ A crop monitoring robot: Like a Roomba, but with more sensors and responsibility. (credit: Megan Geuss)

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD—Last week's ARPA-E summit was full of big ideas about the future of energy, and nowhere was that more evident than on the summit's show floor. In the basement of the sprawling Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center, dozens of academic institutions and companies set up booths to show off what they had been working on with their grant money.

From cars to recycling to electricity-generating turbines to biofuels, the warehouse temporarily turned into a montage of earl-stage ideas. Most importantly, it also showed off the breadth of ARPA-E's work: though the Department of Energy's early-stage grant program has at times been cast as an accelerator for renewable energy exclusively, ARPA-E projects span a variety of fuels and even include some non-energy projects whose application could save industry a significant amount of energy.

Three new studies suggest that early humans in East Africa started doing much more complex things—making more sophisticated tools, trading with neighboring groups for better stone, and maybe even using symbols to communicate—in order to survive rapid climate shifts 320,000 ago. Those findings may support the theory that bigger social networks, more complicated tool-making technology, and symbolic thinking helped drive early humans to evolve larger brains by the Middle Pleistocene, around 200,000 years ago.

But that kind of development doesn't just happen. Brains are expensive organs to maintain, in terms of the energy required to keep them nourished and oxygenated, and that size upgrade would have come at a cost. To succeed, bigger brains would have to offer enough of a survival advantage to outweigh the extra burdens they entail.

For that to be the case, humans' ability to survive and reproduce would have to depend on the things we might need such a big brain for, like communicating with lots of other humans in more complex ways or making and using more complex tools. That's why many paleoanthropologists have suggested that the kinds of cultural developments we see in Middle Stone Age sites in East Africa could have been responsible. Cultural development, in other words, drove the physical evolution of our brains in a really major way.

CEDAR PARK, Texas—"Last time you came out here, it was just a pile of dirt," Firefly Aerospace CEO and rocket scientist Tom Markusic tells me. I looked it up afterwards—he's not lying. Back in 2014 when Ars Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson traveled just north of Austin to visit Markusic's then-infant new space company, he essentially got a rocket science lesson (charts and everything) and walked the patch of non-grass where the company would one day build its engine testing facilities. It looked like this...

]]>Part of the Great Barrier Reef exposed to more CO₂; results are grimhttps://arstechnica.com/?p=1274685
Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:25:11 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=1274685

Enlarge/ Water carrying a dye and added CO₂ is bubbled over the Great Barrier Reef. (credit: Aaron Takeo Ninokawa )

Coral reefs are not just pretty and cool—beyond tourism dollars and once-in-a-lifetime diving experiences, they provide real utility to human society. They provide homes to about a quarter of the world’s fish, which many people rely on as a food source. They can act as a barrier to rising sea levels, and they can protect coastlines from eroding.

But thanks to all the carbon we’ve pumped into the air, coral reefs are disappearing. Fast. Part of that is heat stress, but CO2 can also influence coral's ability to form reefs in the first place. A new experiment gives us our first look at how much this affects a complete reef ecosystem.

When oceans take up atmospheric carbon dioxide, they acidify. This in turn depresses the concentration of carbonate ions in the water. When there is a dearth of carbonate ions in seawater, coral reefs, made of carbonates, dissolve to restore the balance. So it stands to reason that increasing carbon dioxide in the water would spell trouble for the corals.

Pfizer’s board reportedly approved the compensation boost because they saw it as a “compelling incentive” to keep Read from retiring. He turns 65 in May. As part of the deal, Read has to stay on through at least next March and is barred from working with a competitor for a minimum of two years after that.

According to Bloomberg, Read’s compensation included in part a salary of $1.96 million, a $2.6 million bonus, $13.1 million in equity awards linked to financial goals and stock price, as well as an $8 million special equity award that will vest if the company’s average stock return goes above 25 percent for 30 consecutive trading days before the end of 2022.

Enlarge/ The future of computing is... a big metal tank? If it turns out there's just a guy with a laptop in there doing Google searches, I'm going to be very disappointed. (credit: John Timmer)

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY—I'm in a room with one possible future for computing. The computer itself is completely unimposing, looking like a metal tank suspended from the ceiling. What makes an impression is the noise, a regular metallic ping that dominates the room. It's the sound of a cooling system designed to take hardware to the edge of absolute zero. And the hardware being cooled isn't a standard chip; it's IBM's take on quantum computing.

In 2016, IBM made a lot of noise when it invited the public to try out an early iteration of its quantum computer, hosting only five qubits—far too few qubits to do any serious calculations but more than enough for people to gain some real-world experience with programming on the new technology. Amidst some rapid progress, IBM installed more tanks in its quantum computing room and added new processors as they were ready. As the company scaled up the number of qubits to 20, it optimistically announced that 50-qubit hardware was on its way.

During our recent visit to IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, the company's researchers were far more circumspect, being clear they weren't making promises and that 50-qubit hardware is just a stepping stone toward quantum computing's future. But they did make the case that IBM was well-positioned to be part of that future, in part because of the ecosystem the company is building up around these early efforts.

Enlarge/ No word on whether study participants were more likely to do a cool walk away from explosions without looking back. (credit: Rockstar Games)

A new, longer-term study of video game play from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Germany's University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf recently published in Molecular Psychiatry found that adults showed "no significant changes" on a wide variety of behavioral measures after two straight months of daily violent game play.

Most scientific studies on the effects of video game violence measure participants right after the completion of a gameplay session, when the adrenaline prompted by the on-screen action is likely still pumping. Researcher Simone Kuhn and her co-authors argue that "effects observed only for a few minutes after short sessions of video gaming are not representative of what society at large is actually interested in, namely how habitual violent video game play affects behavior on a more long-term basis."

To correct for the "priming" effects inherent in these other studies, researchers had 90 adult participants play either Grand Theft Auto V or The Sims 3 for at least 30 minutes every day over eight weeks (a control group played no games during the testing period). The adults chosen, who ranged from 18 to 45 years old, reported little to no video game play in the previous six months and were screened for pre-existing psychological problems before the tests.

Excavations in the Denisovan Cave have yielded tiny bone fragments that have had an outsized impact on our understanding of human evolution. (credit: Bence Viola)

For a brief period in our species’ history, we shared our world with other sapient humans, closely related to us but distinct. We don’t know much about how our ancestors interacted with these other now-extinct hominins, but we know that at least some of those interactions were pretty intimate, because many modern humans now carry traces of DNA from Neanderthals and another ancient hominin group called Denisovans.

Most modern people of European and Asian descent carry between one- and three-percent Neanderthal DNA, and most people of Asian and Oceanian descent carry up to five-percent Denisovan DNA. Because Neanderthals and Denisovans arose outside Africa, the ancestors of modern African people would never have encountered them, although researchers have suggested that a so-far unidentified hominin species in Africa mingled with our ancestors there, so all of us may carry traces of that distant relative as well.

These weren’t isolated incidents. The genetic legacy that many of us now carry is probably the mark of years of sustained contact between two groups. Consistent with that, it now turns out that humans may have had contact with Denisovans not just at one place and time, but two.

The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 not only claimed millions of jobs and houses, it took a toll on our health, too, according to a new study published in PNAS this week.

After the financial crisis, researchers studying a cohort of nearly 4,600 middle-aged and older adults found significant boosts in blood pressure and blood glucose levels—both contributors to health problems such as heart disease. Because the researchers had years’ worth of baseline health data on the group, they could determine that the increases were well beyond what was expected for the group based on aging and progression of preexisting health conditions alone. However, some of the increases—but not all—could be explained by some participants who stopped taking or decreased their blood pressure and diabetes medication after the recession. This appeared to be another harmful side-effect of the economic downturn.

Overall, the participants who appeared to take the hardest knocks to their health were those who were already taking medications before the recession and had the most to lose: middle-aged adults in the workforce who may fear job loss and older, more highly educated adults who owned their homes and were most likely to have invested in the stock market.

Something very strange happened in the world of science news this week. A month-and-a-half-old press release, which reiterated news that was released in 2017, suddenly spawned a flurry of coverage. To make matters worse, a lot of that coverage repeated claims that range from biologically nonsensical to impossible. So if you've seen any mention of astronaut Scott Kelly's DNA this week, it's probably best if you immediately forget anything you read about it.

How did Scott Kelly's genes end up one of the hottest news stories? I really have no idea. The "news" apparently traces back to a NASA press release that came out on the last day of January. That release uses a lot of words to say that attendees of a recent workshop had agreed that preliminary findings NASA had announced a year earlier were legit. So really, the "news" here is well over a year old. Yet somehow, this release has triggered a geyser of news coverage at major outlets including CNN, USA Today, and many others.

While this would clearly be an odd situation, it wouldn't be much of a problem if most of the coverage didn't involve a horrific butchering of biology. To understand the story, we have to understand the biology—and why Scott Kelly's journey through space could tell us something about it.

On March 14, UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats in response to a March 4 "military grade" nerve agent attack that poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as well as a police detective who visited his home in Salisbury, England. Dozens of other people may have also been exposed to the nerve agent in a pub and restaurant the Skripals visited before they were found unconscious on a bench.

UK law enforcement and security officials have said that the nerve agent used in the attack was one of a series of chemical weapons developed by the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War known as Novichok, or "newcomer." Today, the leaders of the UK, the US, France, and Germany issued a joint statement condemning Russia for the attack, stating that it "constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War," and demanding full disclosure of the Novichok program by Russia to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg offered "practical support" if May's government requests it, saying the attack "has no place in a civilized world." And further diplomatic action from France and Germany against Russia is expected.

One of the great purported boons of GMOs is that they allow farmers to use fewer pesticides, some of which are known to be harmful to humans or other species. Bt corn, cotton, and soybeans have been engineered to express insect-killing proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and they have indeed been successful at controlling the crops' respective pests. They even protect the non-Bt versions of the same crop that must be planted in adjacent fields to help limit the evolution of Bt resistance.

But new work shows that Bt corn also controls pests in other types of crops planted nearby, specifically vegetables. In doing so, it cuts down on the use of pesticides on these crops, as well.

Entomologists and ecologists compared crop damage and insecticide use in four agricultural mid-Atlantic states: New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Their data came from the years before Bt corn was widespread (1976-1996) and continued after it was adopted (1996-2016). They also looked at the levels of the pests themselves: two different species of moths, commonly known as the European corn borer and corn earworm. They were named as scourges of corn, but their larvae eat a number of different crops, including peppers and green beans.

All of the world's oceans have a similar pattern of currents. Surface waters warm near the equator, then flow toward the poles, where they cool and sink. The cold, dense bottom water makes its way back to restart the cycle. This pattern has particular significance in the North Atlantic, where the flow of warm surface water helps moderate the climate of Northern Europe, parts of which might otherwise resemble Greenland.

A lot of people have pondered whether the warming induced by climate change could interfere with this conveyor belt, preventing the water that nears the Arctic from cooling and sinking. Most analyses, however, suggest that this could only happen after the world had warmed enough that Europe wouldn't need the currents to moderate its temperature.

A new study, however, suggests that there's a tipping point for the Atlantic conveyor that could be reached much sooner. It only relies indirectly on warm temperatures; instead, it is driven by the melting of the Greenland Icecap. And the new research suggests we've already gone nearly halfway to the tipping point.

Enlarge/ One indication of Suriname's complicated past is its large Hindu population. (credit: David Stanley)

Tiny Suriname, the smallest country in South America, punches far above its weight in linguistic diversity. Many people speak Dutch, but if you visit, you're also likely to hear Hindi, Javanese, a variety of indigenous languages, Portuguese, Cantonese, and possibly others. This real-world Babel, in a country of fewer than 600,000 people, is a relic of Suriname’s colonial history.

The language that enables everyone to communicate is Sranan. It's a creole that serves as a linguistic time capsule, capturing Suriname’s brief tenure as a British colony before the territory was ceded to the Dutch in 1667. This time capsule status has allowed a group of researchers to use Sranan to reconstruct details about migration to the colony from England in the 1600s. Their results show how cultural artifacts could be used to trace human migration—and might one day help researchers trace the origins of enslaved people.

A living linguistic fossil

Creole languages arise in relatively extreme situations, when different groups of people find themselves in prolonged contact without a shared language—like in a young colony. People use bits of different languages to try to communicate, and over generations, these halting “pidgin” languages become fully fledged natural human languages: creoles.

But until Congress passes a new budget, the fate of ARPA-E is uncertain. In the face of that uncertainty, the agency's annual summit still convened in Washington, DC, this week, and its leaders addressed the crowd of scientists and entrepreneurs with words that seemed to be more for administration higher-ups than for the choir to whom they preached.